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Vista Is Good

mattmaroon.com

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Re: Vista Is Good

#11

Post by axod »

You don't win by being "good". You win by being outstanding. MS died and stopped being relevent to anything much a long while ago.

What features does vista have that XP doesn't that are worthwhile? What is pushing people to upgrade? Nothing as far as I can see.

Now you can buy PCs without an OS, and some very cool portables like the asus eeepc using linux, I'd expect MS dominance to take a major bashing over the next years on PCs. Not to mention the march of Apple.

You can't really start an article with "As Apple fanboyism has spread throughout the tech publications" and expect to be taken seriously. Especially when you then churn out obvious Microsoft fanboyism.

I think to be honest the whole point is becoming moot. The operating system is becoming irrelevent. Everything is moving onto the web (Despite ms trying hard to stop it by adding bugs and incompatibilites into IE ;) ). Luckily though IE is nose diving in usage.

Add to that the new motherboards that ship with linux for a fast startup into a browser, and what is the reason for most people to boot into a full blown monolithic beast such as vista?

Re: Vista Is Good

#12

Post by hsmyers »

"Works for me" does not represent any useful information.Frankly I listen to the people it doesn't work for--- and they are legion. Since I develop for Windows (but open source for any) I have a machine that runs Vista, just like I have a machine that runs XP and another that runs W2K. Any thing else and I won't work for the client unless he gives me a machine to test with. From my experience (not lack of sample size, common to the blogger...) of the three only W2K is stable. Not to mention smaller, faster, simpler and a host of other superlatives. I intend sometime later tonight to OK VistaSP1 and I am prepared for the possible crash--- I believe myself to be safe since such problems were tied to AMD chips and not INTEL. By the way 'wumi' is a CPU one of those single points of failure you claim are all of the problem? And as for the new version of search in Vista; does any one know a working method to revert it back to at least XP if not W2k. There are many worthwhile 12 step programs in the world, windows search isn't one of them.

--hsm

Re: Vista Is Good

#13

Post by tx »

A lot of Vista bashing is coming form ex-Windows programmers being dog-tired of coding for this platform, which hasn't been an enjoyable experience lately. Problem is that it's virtually impossible to code relatively complex software for Windows that can be installed on a typical "Windows box". There is no such thing anymore: Windows machines are like jungles populated by all kinds of trojans, software firewalls (often several of them), anti-popup programs, anti-spyware programs, anti-anti spyware, and so on... Computers are being sold new in a barely usable shape (pre-damaged by sacks of crapware), can you imagine what do they turn into after 2 years in average Joe's hands? Letting your code run down there without a programmer's supervision is like picking up a Burmese prostitute without a condom: can be done, but it's a tough exercise.

My friend got a Dell laptop and it's touchpad (made by Logitech) greets him every morning with a pop-up. WTF?

Re: Vista Is Good

#14

Post by LPTS »

mattmaroon wrote: post #8
LPTS wrote: post #6

The feature that Matt says he likes (searching, eg poker) is much better implemented with Quicksilver on Mac OS X.

Does it search inside of files? I did like Quicksilver a lot. But it isn't fair to compare an OS against an OS and a third party program.

You can make it do that. You can have different search domains for different shortcuts. With how I customized it, I hit apple+space to do normal stuff, option apple space to use it to access tho menu bar commands, etc. You could set one shortcut to do normal stuff and another to customize.

Compare Vista plus any app you want with it. If search is your priority, quicksilver is better. I don't have a horse in this OS race (but I think Apple is generally brilliant and Microsoft lacks vision). Plus, it's free.

Re: Vista Is Good

#15

Post by trevelyan »

hsmyers wrote: post #12

"Works for me" does not represent any useful information.Frankly I listen to the people it doesn't work for--- and they are legion. Since I develop for Windows (but open source for any) I have a machine that runs Vista, just like I have a machine that runs XP and another that runs W2K. Any thing else and I won't work for the client unless he gives me a machine to test with. From my experience (not lack of sample size…

I bought a new Fujitsu laptop that came preloaded with Vista. Technically the machine is no slouch.

Right-clicking on the network button to open a network connection reults in a grey box loading and hanging on the page for 10 seconds or so before it disappears. At that point you can click on the exact same icon and have a list of options, one of which is "Open Network Connection". Clicking on that results in another 10 second wait, after which a list of possible networks to connects to opens up.

Either one of those waits would be permissable if Windows really needed to check if the network existed (doesn't take that long under Ubuntu though....). But both? And for the system to show nothing but plain grey boxes?

Frankly, I don't find the OS particularly usable for anything except Photoshop. And I'll be getting around to installing Wine soon.

Re: Vista Is Good

#17

Post by bouncingsoul »

You've conflated two separate issues (Vista the OS and Vista's launch) so it's hard to argue accurately about this. I think you're using a too-broad definition of launch if you can offer improved search as evidence of a successful one.

I would agree that Vista is an upgrade in the same way XP was: moderate improvements with new UI things to learn. And I think you're very right to refer back to XP's launch and how the same complaining was made then.

But I don't see who you can call Vista's launch a success. This would probably be better debated with empirical data about sales and time on the market and stuff, but just the general vibe about Vista is so horribly negative in ways I don't remember XP's ever being.

You say this is because more people are making their negative reactions known this time around, and we should ignore them because people like to bitch. But I don't think it's a forgone conclusion that their reactions would be negative -- they could've reacted positively.

I doubt Microsoft is proud of Vista's launch.

Re: Vista Is Good

#19

Post by bouncingsoul »

mattmaroon wrote: post #8
LPTS wrote: post #6

The feature that Matt says he likes (searching, eg poker) is much better implemented with Quicksilver on Mac OS X.

Does it search inside of files? I did like Quicksilver a lot. But it isn't fair to compare an OS against an OS and a third party program.

OS X has Spotlight, which searches inside files. It's probably comparable to Vista's search.

Re: Vista Is Good

#20

Post by ComputerGuru »

tx wrote: post #13

A lot of Vista bashing is coming form ex-Windows programmers being dog-tired of coding for this platform, which hasn't been an enjoyable experience lately. Problem is that it's virtually impossible to code relatively complex software for Windows that can be installed on a typical "Windows box". There is no such thing anymore: Windows machines are like jungles populated by all kinds of trojans, software firewalls (oft…

You're partially right. I'm a Windows programmer, and that's probably why I switched to Linux with the Vista release. I still program for Windows, but from the safety and comfort of a virtual machine. What you say about spyware and trojans and viruses simply isn't true - it's really easy to keep a Windows machine clean: NOD32 + Windows Defender is more than enough. However, the reason for "which hasn't been an enjoyable experience" can be found in the lack of stability and performance that we're seeing on the Windows platform. A decade's worth of Win32 gunk has caught up with Vista, and it's made coding Windows applications a serious PITA. It seems that somewhere between Windows XP and Windows Vista the proverbial "last straw" was added, and it's made coding for Windows Vista such a dreadful nightmare. It's not fun; & more to the point, it's exasperating.

Using a framework like .NET helps like crazy (.NET:Beautiful::Win32:Ugly) but the performance and reliability issues still persist no matter what you build your applications on.

Take for instance my current Vista install. Out of the blue it won't resolve DNS addresses - for no reason. Basically, the mess of code that is the TCP/IP stack - just like the other stacks in need of a from-scratch implementation on Windows - has gotten corrupted somewhere along the way to the point that reinstalling networking drivers, clearing ARP routes, etc. just won't fix.

Too much gunk === impossibly difficult to keep stable/reliable for any period of time.

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